One of the most critical situations with Distributed Generators (DG – embedded generators in Europe) is that a interrupter on a distribution feeder may trip to isolate a circuit section and the DGs might continue supplying the load on that section, creating an “island”. When load closely match generation in the island, it may be sustained for some time, posing safety hazards – this is known to have caused death.
Distributed generators have various passive or active anti-islanding mechanisms that open a breaker at the point of connection when an islanding condition is detected. However, islanding detection techniques used in small DGs (such as residential photovoltaic generators) are far from perfect – without expensive circuitry, they may not always immediately detect an island when generation and load are closely matched. Therefore, some utilities require that load on any feeder section (i.e., between interrupters) be always greater than generation, ensuring that an island cannot sustain itself. This means that the total distributed generation capacity on a feeder section must be significantly less than the minimum aggregated load on that section. The problem is compounded by the fact the engineers assessing DG connection requests usually do not know actual load and generation per line section – estimations need to be made.
In the end, allowable distributed generation on a line section can be a pretty small number – in Ontario, Hydro One requires that total generation must not exceed 7% of the annual line section peak load – meaning that few customers are allowed to have generators.
Applying analytics on smart meter data can better assess how much distributed generation can safely be connected to a line section. For instance, minimum load may never be correlated with maximum generation – e.g., in hot climates, minimum load occurs at night, when there is no solar generation. Analytics can look into past load and generation records to determine how much generation can be connected without getting into potential islanding condition. Safe generation levels may be many times more than the previous conservative worst-case-that-never-happens engineering guidelines allowed.
